The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

In a vain attempt to try to nudge Graham's reading taste forward, really to expand the set of books available to him -- because he has so picked over the offerings of the local public library that I marvel that he finds anything at all when I take him on our (greatly beloved) weekly pilgrimage there -- I checked out what I had heard was Agatha Christie's masterpiece, the 1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.*  He turned up his nose at it.

I was about to return it to the library, when I thought I'd better Google it.  And lo and behold, I find it was voted sometime recently by like the mystery writers of the world to be the greatest mystery ever written.  Them's some big words.  Having never actually read a Christie novel, I thought I owed it a look.

So I didn't return it, and began reading it instead.  And, thus far, I'm not feeling it.  100 pages in, yes, it's mysterious.  And there, already in this early stage, we have Poirot, twirling his moustache.  But still.

Then again, it's only 200 pages long, and I'm 100 in, so I'll keep rolling with it.


Just realized that the story in the Times today about the DNA-based exoneration of two brothers in NC prison for murders 31 years ago is the work of my old next-door neighbor Gerda and her colleagues at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation.  Beautiful.




*Blech, what a sentence.  If this were anything but a blog, I would really go back and edit it.  But a blog it is, and so it will stand.